All of the large-scale Dask collections like
Dask Array, Dask dataframe, and Dask bag
and the fine-grained APIs like delayed and futures
generate task graphs where each node in the graph is a normal Python function,
and edges between nodes are normal Python objects
that are created by one task as ouptuts and used as inputs in another task.
After Dask generates these task graphs it needs to execute them on parallel hardware.
This is the job of a task scheduler.
Different task schedulers exist.
Each will consume a task graph and compute the same result,
but with different performance characteristics.

Dask has two families of task schedulers:

Single machine scheduler: This scheduler provides basic features on a
local process or thread pool. This scheduler was made first and is the
default. It is simple and cheap to use. It can only be used on a single
machine and does not scale.

Distributed scheduler: This scheduler is more sophisticated, offers
more features, but also requires a bit more effort to set up. It can
run locally or distributed across a cluster.

For different computations you may find better performance with particular scheduler settings.
This document helps you understand how to choose between and configure different schedulers,
and provides guidelines on when one might be more appropriate.

The threaded scheduler executes computations with a local multiprocessing.pool.ThreadPool.
It is lightweight and requires no setup.
It introduces very little task overhead, around 50us per task,
and because everything occurs in the same process,
it incurs no costs to transfer data between tasks.
However due to Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL),
this scheduler only provides parallelism when your computation is dominated by non-Python code,
such as is the case when operating on numeric data in NumPy arrays, Pandas dataframes,
or using any of the other C/C++/Cython based projects in the ecosystem.

The threaded scheduler is the default choice for
dask array, doc:dask dataframe <dataframe>, and dask delayed.
However if your computation is dominated by processing pure Python objects
like strings, dicts, or lists,
then you may want to try one of the process-based schedulers below
(we currently recommend the distributed scheduler on a local machine).

The multiprocessing scheduler executes computations with a local multiprocessing.Pool.
It is lightweight to use and requires no setup.
Every task and all of its dependencies are shipped to a local process,
executed, and then their result is shipped back to the main process.
This means that it is able to bypass issues with the GIL and provide parallelism
even on computations are are dominated by Pure Python code,
such as those that process strings, dicts, and lists.

However moving data to remote processes and back can introduce performance penalties,
particularly when the data being transferred between processes is large.
The multiprocessing scheduler is an excellent choice when workflows are relatively linear,
and so do not involve significant inter-task data transfer,
and when inputs and outputs are both small, like filenames and counts.

This is common in basic data ingestion workloads,
such as those are common in dask bag,
where the multiprocessing scheduler is the default.

For more complex workloads,
where large intermediate results may be depended upon by multiple downstream tasks,
we generally recommend the use of the distributed scheduler on a local machine.
The distributed scheduler is more intelligent about moving around large intermediate results.

The single-threaded synchronous scheduler executes all computations in the local thread,
with no parallelism at all.
This is particularly valuable for debugging and profiling,
which are more difficult when using threads or processes.

For example, when using IPython or Jupyter notebooks the %debug, %pdb, or %prun magics
will not work well when using the parallel dask schedulers;
they were not designed to be used in a parallel computing context.
However if you run into an exception and want to step into the debugger
you may wish to rerun your computation under the single-threaded scheduler,
where these tools will function properly.